HI everyone, Trish again, with another update on how "relatching with an almost 2 year old" is going. In just the short time since I posted, Bobby will now take a bottle nipple all the way into his mouth. His sucking is really unorganized and sloppy, mostly with bites, but if I squeeze the bottle to make it easy for him to get the milk, he does suck on the nipple. You don't know how encouraging it is to see him doing something so normal. (Sucking, I mean, not necessarily on a bottle nipple!) I was at a party the other night with many nursing babies. I was able to give Bobby a real bird's eye view of a toddler nursing, and he watched and looked away a few times, but I could see that he was intently looking. I didn't think too much of it until about a half hour later, when someone sat down next to me, not knowing Bobby's story, asked me what the NG tube was for. As I was explaining how he came to have it, she asked me if he nurses at all anymore. I said, pulling up my shirt, "No, not really, watch, he'll lick it once in a while...", and as I was blabbering away, he grabbed my breast with both hands and licked the nipple with this long, lapping tongue, over and over, looking up at me and smiling. It was all I could do to breathe! The woman next to me thought this was totally normal, and had no idea what she was witnessing was near miraculous. So I don't really care if he ever nurses again, because I'm just having too much fun watching him shock the pants off of me when I least expect it! Then there was something else that happened this week that I wanted to share with all of you. I was talking to Bobby's cardiologist about the medication they are beginning to use to decrease lymphatic drainage in babies with a chylothorax. It is called somatistatain, it is a naturally occurring hormone in our blood, and it is also found in breastmilk in concentrations 4 times higher than that of our bloodstream. Bobby's case was the first time they had ever tried it at his particular hospital. Anyway, he told me that they have used somatistatin on 4 other cases of chyothoracies since Bobby left the hospital last year, and not one of them was successful. No coincidence, I think. It must have been the combination of the somatistatin in the skim breastmilk and the synthetic somatistatin (medication name "Octreatide") which proved to be enough to stop the drainage. Just thought you LCs who work in the NICUs might find that interesting. Can I say thank you enough to all you wonderfully supportive people? I can't tell you the difference in both my and my son Bobby's attitude toward this whole process since I posted about a month ago. Trish Whitehouse, RN, LLL Leader *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html